Customer Effort Score

Find out why or why not Customer Effort Score (CES) outperforms Net Promoter and Customer Satisfaction scores. Is it better to satisfy rather than delight? Should 'making it easy' for your customers be your biggest priority?

Customer Effort Score (CES) is measured by asking a single question: “How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?”

11 December 2012

When trying to consider what makes the perfect customer experience there are three key elements I use. The first is helpfulness; are they really prepared to help me? The second is value for time; do they respect and make efficient use of my time? And third is customer recognition; when I contact them do they acknowledge me as an individual?

Typically when businesses try to predict customer loyalty they look at customer satisfaction, which is actually a poor measure of customer loyalty. They use statistics garnered from metrics such as Net Promoter Score. However, just because we are a satisfied customer does not mean we will go back and spend again.

A great measure of customer loyalty is the Customer Effort Score research, which has come out of Harvard and measures the predictive power for re-purchasing and the predictive power of increased spending. Customer Effort Score outperforms Net Promoter Score and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) in predicting repurchasing and has highlighted that it is increasingly important for businesses to make it easy to be a customer.

A large health insurance plan and AVOKE customer recently used AVOKE Analytics to improve the identification process in their IVR. They knew that members struggled to provide their ID, but needed to understand the specific reasons why - and what changes would improve the process. The company wanted to both reduce the amount of effort required to use the IVR, and increase the number of members that successfully identified in the IVR.

4 December 2012

As the saying goes – you can’t manage what you don’t measure. To overcome this many companies look to a single metric that they can use to measure the health of their company and that business leaders can use to predict future performance of the organisation.

No one question can give all the answers needed across a business – but compromises have to be made between the simplicity of a single question and a drawn out survey that results in a poor response rate. A single question can be asked frequently and across multiple industries and countries giving business leaders a sense of momentum of their own organisation and comparison with others.

Which question to choose?

With many options out there, which single question is the best measure of today and predictor of future performance?